Women face a ton of pressure to “bounce back” to their pre-pregnancy selves immediately after their baby is born. Some of it is pressure on ourselves and some of it is… Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s all those magazine covers flashing the stretch-mark-free midsections of the latest celebrity who has seemingly passed through pregnancy physically unscathed???
I know I was sorely disappointed after Mazzy was born and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to pop back into my non-maternity jeans for the drive home from the hospital— why doesn’t anyone warn you that you’re still going to look six months pregnant when you’ve given birth six months ago?!?
Of course, women have plenty of good reasons to take our time getting back to our old selves (assuming we ever do), but nobody points out just how unrealistic our post-baby body expectations are quite like Tova Leigh of My Thoughts About Stuff.
Check out her checklist of reasons we should give ourselves a break below!
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This was awesome and so true. I would just add, as a C-Section mama (remember 30% of deliveries in the US are by C-Section and NO it is not the “easy way out) – my junk may not have been torn up but my abdomen was sliced open and my organs physically moved by the surgeons to get the baby out (did you know they have to lift up your bladder and pull it so that it lays outside your body to get to the uterus? And then they cut open the uterus? So you really have two major surgeries in one (abdominal cutting/pulling apart and uterine cutting) AND you are basically disassembled too? And you are awake? Not feeling anything but laying on a metal table in a stark white operating room with a little sheet keeping you from witnessing your own gutting?) So anyways, no junk may not be torn up, but I was gutted like a fish and have a major surgery incision where my body was stitched back together, to heal from. And since you need your abs to do pretty much everything and after the C-section they are full of pain and weak, bouncing back ain’t no picnic for the C-section mamas either! (I know she wasn’t trying to snub the C-section mamas and is just talking about her own experience, but she was generalizing it to all post-partum women, but speaking as though we all have vaginal deliveries. We just tend to get accidentally left out of these rants and sometimes it’s annoying. I thought the video was great except for that one thing! Maybe she can recruit a C-section mama friend to make a companion video. 🙂)
This lady is great!